The Cold Summer

by Gianrico Carofiglio

  It took Fenoglio a while to realize that he was holding his breath.

  “I asked him what the fuck he was doing. He was very calm. He said I shouldn’t worry, he’d see to it – the duty report and all the rest. I’d fallen on the ground and hadn’t seen what had happened. I just had to confirm that I’d heard the guy shooting.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I think you know what I’m saying.”

  For a few moments, Fenoglio was enveloped in an unbearable, suffocating sense of unreality. “Did the 6.35 have an erased serial number?”

  “Of course.”

  “Did you know he had it?”

  “No.”

  “You confirmed his version.”

  “Yes. I signed the duty report, and when the examining magistrate questioned me I repeated the same things.”

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t know what to do, I felt trapped. Everything happened too quickly. When the others arrived, that was the story he told them. Then they asked me and I confirmed it. You know when things happen to you and you realize you can’t control them?”

  “Damn.”

  “But it wasn’t only that. I was scared. We’d done things together.” Pellecchia seemed to be all psyched up, and he couldn’t stop now. “Illegal things. Things that happen when you’re working in narcotics for a long time.”

  “Go on.”

  Pellecchia sniffed, rubbed his eyes and went on. “Sometimes when we confiscated coke, we kept back part of it. We used it for our informants.” He shook himself as if an unpleasant idea had suddenly occurred to him and he had to express it immediately. “I never put a sachet in someone’s pocket to frame them, though. I swear that. I used it only as gifts for the junkies who gave me tip-offs.”

  “And maybe you did some yourselves.”

  Pellecchia nodded without even attempting to deny it. “It helped with girls he knew, girls who wanted to have fun. If you had coke, everything was much easier.”

  “What else did you do?”

  “Nothing. Just the drugs.”

  The words hung in the air for a few minutes. The smell of the sea had become more intense.

  “Savicchio did other things.”

  “Such as?”

  “More than once he suggested robberies. He said we should rob a gambling den or steal from one of the whores. I told him I didn’t agree with that, and anyway it was too dangerous. He’d say I didn’t understand a damned thing, we wouldn’t be doing anything wrong, we wouldn’t be taking money from respectable people, but from criminals. Nobody would ever report it, and anyway it was perfectly safe, because we were carabinieri. We could wear balaclavas and drive a service car but with stolen number plates. Immediately afterwards, we could take off the balaclavas, put the number plates back and continue on our rounds. Maybe we could even make an arrest immediately afterwards.”

  “Do you think he went ahead with these robberies?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who with?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “With another …” – Fenoglio realized he couldn’t use the word “colleague” – “… with another carabiniere?”

  “It’s possible. It’s just as possible that he worked with a professional criminal. He’s crazy. Anyway, after that business with the young guy, I asked to change departments. They put me on robbery, and a couple of years later I went to organized crime.”

  “With that shooting, did they accept it as self-defence?”

  “Yes.”

  “What has this got to do with the Grimaldi case?”

  Pellecchia screwed up his eyes. Whenever the sun managed to break through the clouds, it was blinding.

  “Savicchio was always talking about how to make easy money. It was an obsession with him. Once, he said we should kidnap the wife of some big trafficker and demand a ransom. I didn’t know whether to tell you about this, because if I did I’d have to tell you about myself as well. I couldn’t make up my mind, but when we heard about the plastic handcuffs – and you told me the boy had that kind of mark on his wrists – I didn’t think I could keep quiet any more.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Savicchio was obsessed with these cops’ gadgets from American films. Plastic handcuffs, pepper spray, stun batons. Actually, he had all kinds of obsessions. For example, he was obsessed with cleanliness. If he shook anyone’s hand, he’d immediately run and wash himself, to get rid of germs, he said. He even shaved his armpits. And he was crazy about anagrams, or reading words backwards. Sometimes he called me Oninot.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s Tonino backwards. He was always doing that, sometimes whole sentences backwards, sometimes anagrams.” Fenoglio tapped his temple with his index and middle fingers. “Crazy.”

  “Crazy. It’s my fault that I didn’t realize it straight away.”

  “How come something as important as this – the fact that Savicchio was thinking about kidnappings – only occurred to you now?”

  “Savicchio said all kinds of things, often just for the pleasure of talking big. He talked about robbing a bank, he talked about getting a consignment of coke from Peru. Once he said that it would be amusing to rape a girl from the flying squad. We could screw a policewoman, he would say. Who would ever think it was carabinieri? He needed to impress: I’m the baddest, I’m the most dangerous. I’m the Antichrist, he sometimes said. You remember when you told me what a psychopath is?”

  “Yes.”

  “When you said that, it struck me that if I’d ever known a real psychopath, it was him. Anyway, what he said about kidnapping the wife of a trafficker I remembered just a few days ago, when I was in the Tremiti Islands.”

  Fenoglio processed this answer. It was a plausible explanation. There was no reason to think that Pellecchia was lying.

  “Is there anything else you haven’t told me? Do you have any other reasons to think it was him?”

  “No, and I don’t have any evidence that it was. But think about it: if it was him, everything would fit.”

  It would fit, yes.

  “What do you think I should do now?” Fenoglio said.

  “If you decide to put in writing what I’ve told you, I won’t deny it. Anyway, I have an idea about what we could do.”

  Fenoglio walked away until he was about thirty feet from Pellecchia. He had the sea at his side and in front of him, and on the horizon the clouds met the water. It struck him as meaningful, some kind of metaphor. He stood there looking at that combination of colours – white and blue and green – for a few minutes. Finally, he turned and walked back.

  “Tell me about your idea.”

  8

  They had gone to a café with tables out on the pavement. There were no other customers, so they could talk without being disturbed and without anyone listening in.

  “You could call him a high-class fence. Though maybe ‘fence’ isn’t quite accurate. If you need to buy something – whatever it is – he can get it for you. If you need to sell something, he can find you a buyer. We’re not just talking about Bari, this guy does business all over Italy and even abroad.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Luigi Ambrosini.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “He’s invisible. Never been sentenced, never been tried, never been searched. He’s like Mandrake the Magician. I don’t know how he’s managed to stay under the radar for so long.”

  “How come nobody knows him if he’s so well connected?”

  “I told you, he’s a magician. Maybe the only case I’ve seen of someone who’s a professional criminal without being known to the police or the Carabinieri.”

  “What’s his cover?”

  “A toyshop.”

  “And you’ve never mentioned him at the station?”

  “No. Every now and again, he gives me a tip-off. When he wants to, when he has some reason connected with his business.”

  “A grownup criminal,” Fenoglio said, as
if talking to himself.

  “What?”

  “A grownup criminal. I make a distinction between criminals who are grownups – and there aren’t many – and those who are children, the vast majority.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When children behave badly, they almost always do it because they want to attract their parents’ attention, because their parents represent authority. They have an ambivalent attitude towards breaking the rules. They don’t want to be punished, but they want to be found out. Most criminals behave the same way; they reproduce the identical model of behaviour in a different situation. They want to be noticed by the authorities, even at the risk of being punished.”

  “Is that why they always boast about what they’ve done, so in the end we catch them?”

  “Exactly. They talk to someone who talks to someone else and so on until someone talks to us. That’s why, as you say, in the end we catch them, one way or another. Except for the grownup ones.”

  “And who are the grownup ones?”

  “Those who commit crimes just to obtain an advantage, like shopkeepers, like entrepreneurs. They don’t feel the need to make themselves noticed – which means they don’t boast. They act out of purely utilitarian motives. They want to gain an advantage and they don’t want to be caught. Very often, they succeed. They’re grownups pursuing rational objectives, not children looking for attention.”

  Pellecchia sniffed. “Shit. Sometimes I wonder …” He let the sentence hang. As if he didn’t know what to say, or as if what he had to say embarrassed him.

  Fenoglio let a few seconds go by before returning to the matter in hand. “Where is Ambrosini’s shop?”

  “In Via Bovio, behind the Garibaldi School. He also has a warehouse nearby, and other premises, but I don’t know where they are.”

  “Why do you think he might help us?”

  “He was on very good terms with Savicchio. Savicchio introduced us; we’d go to see him, he’d offer us coffee and give us some information. My impression was that the two of them met often, not just when we went to see him together. Sometimes they went off into a corner and talked between themselves. Sometimes when they said goodbye, they’d say things like: I’ll give you a call. I think they were doing some kind of business together.”

  “Okay, so we can say they’re friends. Let’s assume, although it’s pure conjecture at the moment, that Savicchio has something to do with the kidnappings in general and the Grimaldi kidnapping in particular. Why should Ambrosini know anything about it?”

  “I have no idea. But I think it’s worth a try. Savicchio talks a lot, and Ambrosini’s a very intelligent man. If the relationship between them is what it used to be and if Savicchio is mixed up in the kidnappings, I’m almost sure that Ambrosini knows something about it.”

  “And why should he help us?”

  “Because we need to make him shit himself. Let’s do a 41 on him, just the two of us. We don’t need to wait for a warrant from the Prosecutor’s Department that way. He won’t be expecting a search, he’s too sure of himself. Let’s put pressure on him. He has to understand that if he doesn’t help us he’s not going to be left in peace any more. We don’t have a fucking thing, so why not try it?”

  It was a flawless argument. They had no clues, no suspects, not even a working hypothesis. They didn’t have a fucking thing, as Pellecchia had put it. So they might as well go and see what this Ambrosini was like. Worst-case scenario, they would gather more material for his incoherent criminological deliberations, Fenoglio told himself, concluding his mental soliloquy.

  “All right. When?”

  “I think we should go when the shop opens this afternoon. As soon as he arrives, we go in with him and make him close up again. That way nobody will bother us and we can start working on him.”

  “Is he the only one in the shop?”

  “There used to be an assistant sometimes. But not always. If she or anyone else comes to open up, we put it off. There’s no point unless he’s alone.”

  “All right,” Fenoglio said, getting to his feet. “The shops open at five. Let’s meet at the corner of Via Bovio and the Garibaldi School at 4.45.”

  “Pietro …”

  Fenoglio made a gesture with his hand, as if to say: I don’t want to hear another word. “Pay the bill,” he said. Then he shook his head, turned and walked away.

  9

  As he crossed Piazza Risorgimento, he looked absently at the Garibaldi School. The two large buildings at the opposite ends of Via Putignani – the Garibaldi School, with its vaguely colonial appearance, and the Teatro Petruzzelli – had, just a few years earlier, been the backdrop for a Hollywood epic about the life of Toscanini. The female lead had been Elizabeth Taylor, playing the soprano Nadina Bulichoff.

  Now the school and the theatre were both closed and unusable. The first due to the wear and tear of years, the second because of the fire that had destroyed it.

  Fenoglio suppressed the impulse to look for a meaning in this symmetry. The problem is always the same: we look for meanings, even where there are none.

  Investigations, too, are an attempt to construct order, to find a meaning. The risk, though, is that the need to be rational makes us lose sight of the most common characteristic of many crimes: their lack of meaning, their dizzying, inscrutable banality.

  He reached the back of the school, where Via Bovio begins, and saw some little boys running after each other. An apparently harmless game, but Fenoglio seemed to perceive a latent violence, something almost feral, in it.

  Pellecchia was already where they had agreed to meet. The toyshop was a few dozen yards further along the street.

  Ambrosini arrived at five on the dot. He was short and incongruously dressed in jacket and tie even though it was July; he wore round glasses in light frames. He looked like a provincial pharmacist.

  “Good afternoon, Signor Ambrosini, Carabinieri,” Fenoglio said, slowly raising his badge. There was no need. The man had seen Pellecchia and recognized him. The two of them didn’t greet each other.

  “Good afternoon, marshal, has something happened?” Ambrosini said.

  “Do you mind if we come in?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “Please close up again when we’re inside. We don’t want to be disturbed for a while.”

  “But I have to open the shop —”

  “Close up, please. You can’t open the shop, we have to conduct a search.”

  “A search? Why?”

  “Let’s go in.”

  “But do you have a warrant?”

  Fenoglio smiled without any warmth.

  “Go in, Ambrosini, and don’t mess us about,” Pellecchia said and shoved him by the shoulder.

  “We’re here to conduct a search as allowed by Article 41 of the Unified Code of Public Safety, Signor Ambrosini. Do you know what that is?”

  “No.”

  In an overly kindly tone Fenoglio recited by heart: “Article 41 of the Unified Code of Public Safety allows law enforcement officers who have information regarding the existence, in any public or private premises or any dwelling, of arms, ammunition or explosives kept without authorization, to conduct an immediate search and confiscate said items. Even without a warrant.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means we’ve had a tip-off that there’s an illegal cache of arms here. We thought it only right to come straight here and check. As you can well understand, there was no time to request a warrant. Haven’t you ever been subjected to a search?”

  Another icy smile, while Pellecchia pulled down the shutter from the inside.

  “Sorry, Ambrosini,” Pellecchia said. “Switch the light on. With this shutter down, we can’t see a damn thing.”

  Ambrosini pressed an old light switch. The place lit up, showing a line of shelves reaching up to the ceiling, overflowing with cardboard boxes, stuffed animals, dolls, plastic rifles, bags of confetti, packets of streamers, robots, snakes and ladder
s, party tricks, water pistols.

  “Am I allowed to call my lawyer?” Ambrosini asked.

  “Why do you want a lawyer, got something to hide?” Pellecchia said, stroking the man’s face. It was a highly intimidating gesture, much more so than a slap would have been.

  “Signor Ambrosini is right. If he wants a lawyer, he can call one. If he thinks it’s a good idea. Do you think it’s a good idea, signore? You know, we can be quite flexible or very strict, depending on the circumstances. If a lawyer comes, we can’t afford to look bad. So we’ll have to search every corner very, very carefully. We might even have to turn everything upside down until we find something. If we don’t find anything, they’ll say we’re conducting arbitrary searches without a warrant and on the basis of unreliable information. When lawyers are involved, we always have to be careful. Are you following me?”

  Ambrosini barely moved his head, to say, yes, he was following. Pellecchia kept one hand on his shoulder.

  “If, on the other hand, you’re less formal about it, then we won’t be forced to be too finicky. Let’s suppose you have something interesting to tell us. Then the search would be – how can I put it? – much less invasive. Maybe you have nothing to fear, maybe you’re not keeping anything illegal, and then you could just say: do what you have to do, I have no problem with it. I’d appreciate that, I like people who have nothing to hide. If the opposite is the case, then a little friendly chat might be a good idea. Because if we do find something illegal, that sets a whole mechanism in motion that’s difficult to stop. Confiscation, arrest, trial. You don’t have a criminal record, do you?”